How to Include Images in Your Article

Attractive and relevant images make your article stand out and hold your reader's interest.  This article will describe two different ways to include images in your article and several services you can use to host and include both public and your own images in your articles.

Including a Featured Image

The featured image is the image at the top of your article.  This is an optional image that can be included in your article.  The featured image should relate to the overall topic of your article.  To add a featured image use the Featured Image field in the article editor.  You should enter a direct URL to the image.  You may also enter a caption and credits for the image as well.

Image Object or HTML Code

Using the toolbar on the article editing page, you can include images by using the Insert/Edit Image button or the Edit HTML Source Button.

If the image hosting service you use supports hotlinking (directly linking to an image), you can include the image by using the Insert/Edit Image button.  If hotlinking is not supported, you will need to use their provided HTML code and place it in your article using the Edit HTML Source button.

Public Images

These services host a variety of searchable images supplied by people from all over, many of them are free to use in your articles, be sure to check for any licensing restrictions when using images from these sources. 

Imgur.com

Imgur.com provides images that will flow nicely into your posts, however, the images will have headers and footers which could draw your reader away from your article.  Hotlinking is not supported.  After you find an image choose the embed option and paste the code into the HTML view of your article.

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Flickr.com

Flickr provides web links to images and headers or footers are optional, you can choose a specific size of the image to include in your post.  Flickr does not support hotlinking.  Flickr provides three methods to use their images: shortened URLs, embeddable code and bulletin board code.  The embeddable code can be used in the article text to show images

Photobucket.com

Photobucket does support hotlinking, you can include your image by adding an image object in your document and putting in the image url directly.  You also use the html version of the images.  You may need to customize the size of the image displayed to have it appear correctly in your post.  Here the images are set to a width of 640 pixels.

Tinypic.com

Tinypic works basically the same as photobucket.  Tinypic supports both hot linking and html code images.  With Tinypic you will still likely need to adjust the size to make it fit correctly in your article.

Using Your Own Images

These websites allow you to host your images for posting on the web, but to not supply search functionality to find others images.  Hotlinking is supported.

Postimage.org

No account is required to use postimage.org.  This service offeres multiple sizes and linking options to link to your image. 

Imagevenue.com

Imagevenue.com only allows hotlinking to thumbnail images.  No account is required.

Freeimagehosting.net

Freeimagehosting.net is an alternate front end for imgur.com, if you choose this service it supports weblinking only and your images are hosted on imjur.com.  No account is required